[originally
published in the newsletter of the Center for the Study of Cultural Values and
Ethics, 1994]

Literacy
has become an increasingly central social and theoretical concern in the United
States. Despite significant variations in its definition, the concept of
literacy informs our notions of education, technology, and modernism, and the
promotion of literacy is now an essential aspect of public policy world wide.
Degree of literacy in a population has become as important a socio-cultural
indicator as gross national product is an economic one. Literacy has become a
national resource, and with literacy levels continually below official targets,
it is as common today to warn of literacy crises as it is to fear oil
shortages.

A
sense of a literacy crisis has been with us in the United States since well
before the momentous Sputnik launch of 1957, which served as an indicator of
the failure of American education and a stimulus for federal spending on the
schools. The publication two years earlier of Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny
Can’t Read (1955)
points to a perceived reading crisis that had been building for much of the
twentieth century. Various late nineteenth-century pronouncements concerning
the inability of college students to write¾for example, that of Adams Sherman
Hill, push back the crisis further still. Hill, Harvard’s Boylston Professor of
Rhetoric, complained in 1885

that the instructors of English in American colleges
have to spend so much of their time and strength in teaching the A B C of the
mother-tongue to young men of twenty¾work disagreeable in
itself, and often barren of result. Every year Harvard sends out men¾some
of them high scholars¾whose manuscripts would disgrace a boy of twelve;
and yet the college can hardly be blamed, for she cannot be expected to conduct
an infant school for adults. [(1885) 1890: 15]

And Bernard
DeVoto (1928) some thirty years later attributed the decline in writing
standards to “the increasing vulgarization of American society and the
democratization of the colleges that accompanied it.” Adding to this heightened sense of decay was the tireless
and belligerent dirge of usage critics that speakers and writers, even those
with claims to professional status, don’t use their language properly at all.
Such complaints peaked in the eighteenth century and have continued unabated ever
since.

Rudolf
Flesch blamed reading failures on an educational methodology that had abandoned
phonics in favor of visual word recognition. The well-known 1975 Newsweek magazine article “Why Johnny Can’t
Write” listed as the causes of the American literacy crisis television,
declining social values, economic conditions, lax parental discipline, the
decay of the family, structural linguistics, and the publication of Webster’s
Third New International Dictionary. Leon Botstein (1990) recently suggested that standard
English, normally considered vital to educational success, can actually be an
impediment to literacy. As if this were not absurd enough, some educators have
even blamed not the readers but the books themselves for the crisis, though
these educators are divided on whether students’ failure to read is caused by
books that are too hard or books that are too easy. As a result, for the past
fifteen years or so college textbook publishers have been asking authors to
lower the difficulty of their texts to a ninth-grade reading level, while a
couple of years ago the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of
Illinois issued a report that had been almost fifteen years in the making which
concluded that basic reading texts failed to teach reading because they used
vocabulary and syntax so simple they failed to capture their readers’ interest
(Anderson, et al., 1985).

As
today’s concerns with the level of student reading and writing illustrate, the
ability to manipulate letters remains indispensable to survival in our society.
Claims that the print culture of the past several centuries is being displaced
by our dependence on television are not supported by our continued and
frequently irrational faith in the written representation of speech. We still feel
uncomfortable with a new word, particularly a new name, until we see it
spelled, and while our word is still our bond, most spoken affirmation must be
quickly followed up by a written confirmation. Except for some few aspects of
legal or religious ceremony, or gambling, a signature rather than an
affirmation remains our strongest guarantee. Students, who still ask if
spelling counts, seem particularly unwilling to question let alone outright
disbelieve what they find between the covers of their textbooks. And legal and
evangelical fundamentalists are ever louder and more insistent that
interpretation of the civil and moral code be bound by the letter and not the
spirit of the written text.

Given
the notion of a literacy crisis that is both pervasive and of long standing, it
may come as a surprise to learn that there is strong disagreement over just
what literacy is, what it does, and how to measure it. More surprising still,
if not indeed shocking, is the challenge mounted in the last decade to the commonly
accepted notion that literacy is an undeniable good, a positive force that can
change not only individual lives but the course of a society. Educators and the
public at large have always confidently assumed that the acquisition of
literacy was a prerequisite to social and economic success in modern life. But
now that assumption has been called into question as some students of literacy
have shown convincingly that the acquisition of reading and writing per se
makes little difference in terms of rigidified class structure. Harvey Graff
(1979) demonstrates that literacy did not improve the status of workers in
nineteenth-century Newfoundland, and Furet and Ozouf (1982: 149) conclude that,
in France, literacy, which was “governed by the prior distribution of
opportunities,” actually reinforced class lines rather than making them more
permeable.

Does
literacy reinforce the status quo or permit individuals and groups to transcend
or alter current social, political, and economic conditions? Probably it can do
both, depending on the circumstances. But more important, the conception of
literacy as a liberating or empowering practice has been tempered, in the minds
of some theorists, with the claim that, insofar as it encourages the
replication of social values and structures, literacy may actually be an
oppressive force in the lives of readers.

Literacy
most probably arose in the ancient Mediterranean as a record-keeping tool, a
means of tracking inventory and accounts receivable. As such it was not always
well received by those illiterates who were excluded from its mysteries. For
example, as Michael Clanchy (1979) notes, when writing was introduced into 11th-century
England on a large scale, illiterate landowners saw it as a nasty Norman trick
for stealing Saxon land (and, at least initially, they were probably right).
Even during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England, when
reading and writing were actively promoted by the literary and religious
establishment and the public image of literacy was at an all-time high, David
Cressy (1980) finds demand for literacy sluggish, and notes that many
influential figures considered it dangerous to teach the general public to read
unless the church or the government could control the texts that they read. To
this day, despite the continuing rehabilitation of noncanonical authors, we
find it necessary to discriminate good reading matter from junk, a process
almost certain to discourage new readers from pursuing their interests when
they clash with standards set by parents and teachers.

Slowly,
over the centuries, literacy came to be considered a social refinement, like
playing the piano; then a social requisite, what you need to get ahead; and
ultimately a technological necessity, what you need in order to survive. Once
the goal of universal literacy was articulated, once indeed it seemed within
our grasp, we began to assume that no one could participate fully in a modern
industrial society without a sufficient degree of literacy, and we now regard
low literacy achievement as evidence of socioeconomic discrimination. But in a way
thinking about literacy has come full circle, for although literacy is still
generally regarded as positive, critics like J. Elspeth Stuckey (1991), in an
up-to-date echo of Saxon suspicions of Anglo-Norman land charters, again
describe it as a capitalist tool, this time not for record keeping but for
oppressing the masses and propping up the status quo.

Whether
we define literacy narrowly as the acquisition of reading and writing, or
broadly as the ability to operate effectively within a given culture or context,
literacy must be regarded as a process of moving from outside to inside, from
unknowing to knowing, from foreign to familiar. But it is also a process of
moving from uncertainty to certainty and back to uncertainty again. As literacy
is acquired we become expert, and one aspect of this expertise involves
learning to question what we know, charting the limits and failings of that
very expertise.

This
came home to me quite clearly and in an extremely mundane situation, during my
first encounter with a Parisian marché. It was early in my Fulbright year in
France, some fifteen years ago, and I had gone out determined to secure the
fixings for a spinach salad. I had practiced with the money for a couple of
weeks, so I wasn’t worried about counting change. Accustomed to purchasing
shrink-wrapped groceries with clearly marked prices in the ounce-pound-quart
system of American weights and measures, I spent some time calculating prices
and watching other customers dealing in French for their fruits and vegetables.
I knew about the metric system from my undergraduate science classes, where
once I had freely manipulated grams and liters and degrees Celsius. I knew also
the mechanical commonplace that a kilogram of lead and a kilogram of feathers
would fall at the same rate in a frictionless environment. But I didn’t realize
that I didn’t know how to translate these metric weights and measures into
marketplace realities. So when I boldly took my turn and called, with the
pretense at confidence that only a foreigner can muster, for “a kilo of
spinach,” I was shocked to receive a gigantic plastic bag full of green leaves,
enough to salad an entire class of students, whereas I was only shopping for my
little family of three.

I
had to think fast while I still had the attention of the clerk. Too embarrassed
to admit that I had ordered too much in the way of greens, I quickly down-sized
my mushroom request, asking in the market lingo I had heard the other shoppers
use, for “un quart de champignons,” or ‘a quarter of mushrooms.’ How was I to know that while spinach sold
by the gram, mushrooms went by the pound? My four ounces of mushrooms, a
handful with not very big caps, wouldn’t go far, especially in the context of
enough spinach to stuff a large pillow.

That
night we ate out. The next time around I got the weights right. But I never
could recalibrate my sense of hot and cold to fit the centigrade scale, and I
spent all that year listening to the météo, or weather report, not knowing the
ambient temperature, forced to select my daughter’s school wardrobe by the
tried and true, but decidedly lo-tech, method of sticking my head out of the
window.

The
point of this is not that travel is broadening, which it may or may not be, but
that literacy is highly contextualized, slowly acquired, often painful or
embarrassing, even for someone who considered himself literate to begin with.
For literacy, to paraphrase the French, the more things change, the more they
are different.

But
what exactly is literacy? Surely I don’t mean by it an activity as specific as
‘the ability to acquire groceries in French,’ or one as vague as ‘the ability
to do anything in general’? Surely literacy has something to do with reading
and writing, and with the time-honored concept of the educated person? Yes,
certainly, but it only exists in the context of the ability to negotiate
cultural matters. The literacy I am describing is really a method of
interpretation, a process of induction into specific forms and ways of knowing
that are bound by circumstance, that change according to time and place as well
as more elusive variables. Literacy as a highly contingent and tentative
interpretation process sharply contrasts with the ordinary notion of literacy
as a static skill with a clearly defined threshold of instantiation and clearly
graded, eminently testable levels of mastery.

Two
of the most familiar referents of literacy today are certainly reading and
writing. But literacy means more than reading and writing, and possibly less as
well. We commonly judge literacy in terms of its absence rather than its
presence, and here we see that the ability to read and write take on special
significance, for it is common today to label people as illiterates who
actually do know their alphabet, who can read and even write, though perhaps
they cannot do so very well, or at least not well enough to meet standards
which tend to be set by others. Originally, illiteracy did mean lack of
knowledge, either the specific inability to process written language or, more
broadly, the absence of a general education. In the eighteenth century Lord
Chesterfield meant by illiteracy an ignorance of Latin and Greek, which in turn
probably signified for him a failure to satisfy the general education
requirements of his age. Literacy is also what we have come to call a gendered
phenomenon: since women did not generally learn Latin and Greek in
eighteenth-century England, Chesterfield would have classed them as illiterate.
In fact with the decline of the Roman Empire European women were excluded from
Latin, speaking only the vulgar Germanic or Romance languages called
pejoratively ‘the mother tongue,’ while men of a certain class or stature were
expected to learn the more prestigious though dying Latin. And in many
societies, women were excluded from script literacy or came to it later and
with more obstacles placed in their way than did men.

By
the late nineteenth century, a time when literacy was making significant
advances in Great Britain, someone unable to read is called totally illiterate by the editors of the
Oxford English Dictionary, which suggests that it was possible to be able to
read and still be considered illiterate, or partially so. This paradoxical
situation has come to be known as functional literacy. The term functional
illiteracy is now
commonly used to indicate that the ability to read and write is present but
inadequate. A functional illiterate is variously defined as someone who cannot
follow simple written instructions (for example, a recipe) or fill out common
forms (applications for employment or a driver’s license). Someone whose literacy
is beneath a designated standard; or is insufficient for a given task.

Literacy,
then, is conceived both as binary¾either you have it or you don’t¾and as a dangerously sliding scale
where illiteracy is always just to the left of where the calibrators happen to
be at the moment. Literacy, which we judge to be more than skin deep, is also
very much in the eye of the beholder. We commonly label as illiterate someone
who does not happen to know something that we do. As Geoffrey Nunberg has
remarked, “three quarters of the American population would qualify as literate
by some standard and illiterate by another” (personal communication). For
example, while the U.S. Census Bureau reports a near-universal literacy rate,
the National Assessment of Educational Progress places only 75% of young adults
above a 9th-grade reading level and Jonathan Kozol (1985) claims that 60
million Americans cannot read and write well enough to function meaningfully in
our society. Calling everyone illiterate when just about everyone can read
borders on the meaningless or suggests that critics really have something else
in mind than ability to read when they level their charges.

We
can observe in this phenomenon a pattern of literacy inflation, whereby as more
and more people acquire literacy, the standards for judging literacy keep
getting raised. To give one significant example of upping the ante: despite the
continually increasing threshold of literacy which we are told that today’s
jobs demand, most workers of tomorrow may be little more than what Andrew Sledd
has called “docile data processors,” “dragging computerized Cheerios boxes
across computerized check-out counters” (1988: 499; 506). On the other side, of
course, are the equally inflated claims that the Cuban or Nicaraguan or Chinese
revolutions have produced almost overnight universal literacy for these
no-longer-oppressed peoples.

As
numbers become inflated in the race to maximize or minimize literacy, we have
also inflated the meaning of the word literacy until it contains little more
than hot air. Literacy has always referred both narrowly to the ability to
encode and decode written language, and broadly to the state of being either
widely educated or skilled in literary technique. We also commonly specify
literacy by extension as knowledge of a particular area or subject. Though we
may fear literacy to be on the decline, literacies are ever on the rise as we
discover newer things to be ignorant about. Thus over the years it has been
customary to go beyond the traditional literacies, the first two of the three
Rs, now often referred to as conventional literacy, and speak in addition of
mathematical literacy, or numeracy, computer literacy, psychological literacy,
musical literacy, historical literacy, economic literacy, natural science
literacy, quantitative literacy, geographical literacy, oracy, ‘fluency in
speaking,’ and even food literacy, visual literacy, rock and roll literacy,
tee-shirt and bumper-sticker literacy, or television literacy, a term found as
early as 1962, though some might consider this last a contradiction in terms.

Following
the laws of lexical thermodynamics, for every literacy there seems to be an
equal and opposite illiteracy. So, on the down side we find, besides
innumeracy, energy illiterates, software illiterates, astronomical illiteracy
(a very large amount?), gesture illiteracy, physical illiteracy (posture and
movement), and for those who find ’doin’ what comes naturally’ an obscure
academic pursuit, there is even sexual illiteracy.

Academic
literacy, another recent term, refers to the savvy beyond mere reading and
writing which students need in order to get through school successfully. And
the umbrella term cultural literacy, the mastery of a shared body of knowledge,
has attracted educators and social critics in the United States seeking a
clearly defined, common curriculum in order to rejuvenate a culture, or at
least an educational system, that they perceive as both fragmented and failing.
Yet critics charge that cultural literacy is little more than a trivia contest
and reject its reliance on a narrow, traditional body of elite Western
knowledge, referred to in slighting terms as the books of dead white men, and
may have been superseded by the newer, more politically correct, multicultural
literacy.

Fascinated
as we are with metadiscourse, those of us who are postmodern, which should make
us ahead of our times, may soon be saying that students of literacy in all its
facets are acquiring literacy literacy, and we will label those who do poorly
in our literacy seminars as literacy illiterate.

While
the attenuation of the meaning of literacy ironically attests to the increasing
importance of literacy as a notion, it doesn’t help us much when we try to
answer the question, “What is literacy?” Some current views deem literacy a simple, easily-documented basic skill
which, once acquired, can be transferred to a variety of contexts, tasks, and
even languages. Hence, for example, the as yet unproven assumption of
proponents of bilingual education that if you teach someone to read in their
native language they will be able to transfer that ability to any language they
subsequently acquire is supported by anecdotal examples: I learned to read in
English, and when I learned French I had no trouble reading French (or was it
just that my ability to read French was never tested outside of the
classroom?). Paradoxically, literacy is also commonly described as a complex,
variable process, something you can’t take with you when you go but have to
relearn and readapt for each new task. Its mastery is contingent rather than
categorical: we can be literate in some things, at some times, and illiterate
in others. Research in writing and reading confirms that expertise is an
important factor in literacy. Both readers and writers perform significantly
better when they are dealing with familiar subject matter. When faced with
subjects outside their specialization, they perform no better than beginners in
the field.

Simply
mastering the schoolbook literacies is no guarantee of expertise, no assurance
that we will be able to pass as literate when negotiating texts outside of the
classroom. My nine year old daughter and her friends get perfect scores on
their school time-telling worksheets, but confronted with a real clock­­­-a digital one, not even the analogue
kind-they
have no idea how to read the numbers, no idea what they mean. Similarly,
failure to excel at the traditional school literacies in no way precludes
success at non-school tasks requiring those same literacies.

At
the other end of the spectrum, those who consider themselves literate in the
broadest of senses feel compelled to hire experts to mediate such difficult and
unfamiliar texts as the tax code, the law, and the internal combustion engine.
Poor readers, who happen coincidentally not to be members of the middle class,
cannot afford to hire such mediators, and consequently tend to fare worse when
dealing with such texts. Part of literacy, then, may be the ability to
recognize one’s limitations, and the ability to seek out and hire experts.

Even
basic reading/writing definitions of literacy are conflicted: can reading exist
without comprehension? This question becomes even more complex when we consider
instances of “reading” sacred languages, like Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit or
Latin, where pronouncing the sacred texts is considered effective even if
understanding is absent. If comprehension is required for literacy, then how
much comprehension is needed to certify reading ability, and how can it
effectively be measured? When we attempt to determine literacy rates in earlier
times, we often rely on what we call signature literacy, the ability to sign
one’s name, for our statistics. But to what extent can signing one’s name be
reliable evidence of the ability to write? And how reliably does signature
literacy imply the ability to read?

The
function of literacy is similarly contested. One school of thought influential
in both anthropological and literary theory contrasts writing with speaking.
Often referred to as the “Great Divide” theory, it argues that literacy,
because it is a later development than orality, is better, that reading and
writing are superior developmentally and cognitively as well as technologically
to speech. Moreover, claims have been made that the invention of writing-in particular, the invention of the
alphabet-is somehow a precondition for the existence of democratic
societies; and that writing has even made possible the mind-set that produced
today’s complex technology (Logan 1986). While such notions may be difficult to
prove, Jack Goody (1986) and Walter Ong (1977) have suggested ways in which the
shift from oral to print-based forms of communication alters human
consciousness and the literacy produced thereby. Brian Stock (1983) takes a
middle ground, examining the influence of a minority literate culture on the
larger mass of illiterates in the Middle Ages. But the Great Divide position is
vigorously disputed by the anthropologists Brian Street (1984) and Ruth
Finnegan (1988), who challenge the notion that orality and literacy are polar
opposites, arguing that oral communication can have the permanence and
objectivity often said to be the major advantages of writing, and that
societies normally defined as literate depend heavily on orality as well.
Writing need not be permanent: it may be as evanescent as the fabled library at
Alexandria or the electric current in a computer. Oral transmission, in turn,
may be more reliable than written: it may sometimes be easier to determine the
trustworthiness of a live speaker than a printed document. Furthermore, writing
may be as subjective and biased as propaganda and advertising. Studying the
Brahmanical tradition of textual interpretation in India, Jonathan Parry (1985)
concludes that the existence of text in a society is no guarantor of
objectivity or modern outlook. At least some of the Hindu sacred texts may have
no fixed form, being reinvented or revised by local gurus. Furthermore, it is
common for Brahmanic authorities to tailor their interpretations of text to
support local tradition or the individual preference of paying customers.

And
Florian Coulmas (1991) disputes the connection often made between alphabetic
writing systems, literacy, and progress. Coulmas points to India, where the
existence of an ancient alphabetic script did not foster either widespread
literacy or economic success, and to Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, countries with
complex writing systems where literacy levels now approach those of Europe and
who now give economic aid to economically unsound East European nations with
well-established traditions of mass alphabetic literacy.

Many
psychologists have conceded the oral/literate distinctions are more complex
than they initially imagined, though they seem reluctant to give up the notion
that reading and writing are very special activities. It is attractive to see
literacy as a watershed in human development; it is simply difficult to prove
what difference it has made. Some investigators have begun to argue that
literacy may have certain definite effects on language processing and other
aspects of cognition as well. For example, Paul Saenger (1991) challenges the
common linguistic assumption that speakers of a language have intuitive
knowledge of what constitutes words or sentences in their language, and that
native speakers can divide sentences into subjects and predicates. He asserts
instead that such knowledge comes only as a result of the increased emphasis on
linguistic structure that accompanies learning to read and write.

Cranking
the discussion up to the next level, converts to the computer argue that
electronic communication is introducing a new sort of cognition into the
literacy debate. According to them, the computer will take the possibilities of
symbolic interaction an order of magnitude higher than that of script or the
printed book. If we think the invention of writing and print made a difference
to human cognition, forcing it into a linear, logical, historical and objective
awareness, well, they say, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The practitioners of
hypermedia in particular promise an entirely new, nonlinear, associative way of
reading texts-or perhaps I should say interacting with them-that will improve learning and
literature. Writing, after all, is not a linear process, although written texts
give the illusion that it is. Texts are often composed hesitantly, in chunks,
recursively, all out of order, and then are edited and spliced into a final
form that gives the impression they were done in a single session, from start
to finish. We assume, perhaps incorrectly, that reading is a linear process because
texts in their final form are linear. In fact, though I myself am a linear
reader in that I go through most books from start to finish, I know many
readers who sample and sift a text rather than reading it front to back,
something readers of reference works do customarily as they skip back and forth
from index to text till they find what they’re looking for. If this is indeed a
more natural way to read, or more natural for those who do it that way, then
associatively constructed texts may be more efficient than conventional ones.
And someday the electronic book may be as popular with our students as video
games are now.

Of
course it took many centuries for writing, and then print, to have any impact
at all on our modern consciousness, whatever that is, and even admitting that
time may flow faster in what our undergraduates love to call “this fast-paced
modern world of today” than it did during that dark age that stretched from
prehistory to the Renaissance, it will be some time before we can assess the
impact of computer literacy.

Literacy is
a protean term, changing with the times and charged with political meaning.
Regardless of its function, literacy is commonly viewed in educational circles
as empowerment through reading and writing, two “skills” prerequisite for
economic success. But although
Harvey Graff has successfully challenged the commonplace notion that literacy
entails socioeconomic rewards, American educational and social policy remains
primarily concerned with eliminating illiteracy in children and adults. In some
ways, the literacy crisis is a direct result, rather than the cause, of such
policy, as we label illiterate an ever-increasing number of people for an
ever-increasing variety of reasons.

Is
there a literacy crisis? That depends on how you measure literacy as well as
what you use it for. Schools are generally faulted for low student achievement
in literacy, and in more extreme cases, for allowing illiterates to graduate.
But a growing number of critics are insisting that the literacy crisis is a
media event; that declining test scores are not surprising when more and more
of the American population comes under the test umbrella.

On
a more basic level, experts disagree over how much literacy we may expect from
a given population: the psychologist George Miller (1988) is confident that
“anyone intelligent enough to master spoken language should be intelligent
enough to master written language.” On the other hand, his colleague Don Norman (personal communication,
1990) wonders whether reading and writing are “at the limit of human abilities,
which is why so large a percentage fail.” And complicating matters still further, despite its intensely positive
public image, public response to literacy remains problematic: though literacy
continues to be valued as “a good thing,” and we remain convinced that literacy
should be readily available through the institution of free, public education,
many people either avoid it or do not or cannot go out of their way to pursue
it. Despite the hype associated with adult literacy programs, and the zeal with
which their instructors approach the problem, their track record is abysmal:
attendance is sporadic, the drop-out rate is high. Too many social and personal
problems get in the way; too many people who might take advantage of such
programs find them inaccessible. For every glowing, emotionallycharged success
story there are myriad failures. Whether or not Andrew Sledd is correct in
assuming that literacy is not as necessary as we have come to consider it, that
it functions as a gatekeeper rather than a liberator, the consumer demand for
reading/writing literacy among adults and children is sometimes simply not
there.

One
final question. Can it be that literacy is always compromised when it is placed
in a school setting? As an educator, I should prefer to think this is not the
case, that those who fail to read and write within our educational system do so
not because the system is inherently flawed, but because of social and economic
and psychological factors which mark literacy as undesirable or make it
unobtainable, and which in some cases the schools are powerless to counter. But
I am convinced that so long as we fail to agree on what literacy is, what use
it serves, and how we can measure it, we cannot simply blame our schools or our
television programs or our dictionaries for failing to instill it.